Friday, December 30, 2016

Every year (for the past... I wanna say four years) the shop I work at hosts, what we call, a "Secret Santa Painting Competition," though there's really nothing competative about it.

Really what it is is an event where people enter a model for another randomly-determined participant to paint for them. They can give some instruction, or none at all. It's pretty fun and it can be a great excuse to get a model painted that you weren't excited to do, and ti's also a chance for you to paint something you never would've painted, or haven't painted in a long time.

In my case, I got to paint a Space Ork (that's right... I'm bringing back the "Space" in "Space Ork"). I haven't painted one since the early 2000s, and I even got to try out painting a checker pattern on his suspenders (the jury's still out on whether I did a good job or not).

Here are all the finished models.

Here's the one I painted for my friend and co-worker, Gopaul.

CHECK out them checkers...

Here's the one that was painted for me.

Anyway, good fun, and a great way to end off 2016. See you all on the other side.

Friday, December 2, 2016

Just a quick little update on how my games of the Lord of the Rings LCG are going. As you recall, I'm attempting to play through all the Saga Expansions that make up the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I'm beginning with "The Hobbit: Over Hill and Under Hill" and goddamn is it hard!

I've played the first scenario four times now, twice with each of the suggested decklists at the back of the booklet inside the box, and I've only come close to defeating the troll brothers once. How the first scenario works is thus: It's divided into three parts. The first part only requires seven progress tokens to complete it, and the encounter deck is lacking in any type of enemies, so this is pretty easy to accomplish. In fact, the first time I attempted it, I breezed past the first part on turn one.

The second part is when the trolls come out to play. Tom, Bert, and William come marching out along with their troll cave, and spell doom for my party. The threat amount they dish out is enough to make you almost lose the game (and engage you, if you haven't made it to 50 threat) if you're not careful, so to mitigate this, I engage one on my turn. The problem with the trolls is that each one imparts a special rule to all of them. One makes it so that the trolls can only be fought by one character (and at armor 2, with 10, 11, and 12 wounds respectively, this isn't easy), one makes it so that no damage can be inflicted on them while in the staging area, and the third won't allow you to play attachment cards on them.

Now, it's still preferable to engage them, because if I don't, they engage me, and that means I draw a card from a deck of "sack" cards. These cards are only bad, as they immobilize various characters (each one's different) for indefinite periods of time. This means they can't do anything until the sack is removed (at which time it's put right back into the sack deck), and these opportunities come infrequently as I've found out.

Needless to say, this is a tough scenario. It only ends once the trolls are defeated or the encounter deck runs out of cards, in which case the sun comes up and the trolls are turned to stone. That's the third part of the scenario... It just ends. So really, the meat is in the middle.

So now I've tried each of the pre-made decks twice; it's time for me to deckbuild. I want to stick with heroes and allies that were present during the age of the Hobbit, and not stray into any LotR-era characters. I've never built a deck in LotRLCG before. I'll post it up where when I do and tell y'all how it went.